Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Backlog drives/February 2024
| Main page | Discussion | How to guide | Resources | Mistagged articles | November 2024 backlog drive (talk) |
|---|
- The following event is now closed. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate talk page.
Welcome to WikiProject Unreferenced Articles's February 2024 backlog drive! The referencing portion began on February 1 and ran until March 1, 23:59 UTC. At the start of the drive, there were 111,643 articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia. At the end of the drive, there were 97,343, a net decrease of 14,300 articles.
There is a very simple way to improve Wikipedia: add at least one inline citation of a reliable source to any article tagged as lacking sources. Fewer unsourced articles means the quality of Wikipedia as a whole increases, accurate information becomes more reliable and transparent, and inaccurate information can be removed. (§ Detailed instructions).
To get through this backlog, which dates back to 2008, we need a lot of people to help with this monumental task. So leave your dent on the backlog today!
1 point was awarded for sourcing. Mass deletion or tag removals were strictly prohibited, and were subjected to disqualification.
If you need tips or guides, you can take a look at § Tips, the helpful guide at WP:CITE, or ask at the WikiProject's talk page. The drive began on February 1 and ran until March 1. To encourage additional reviews, the drive was extended for one week (March 1-8) as an additional review period. Only reviews were counted during this period.
Rules
edit- 1 point for adding at least one inline citation from a reliable source to an unreferenced article, usually tagged with {{Unreferenced}} or {{BLP unsourced}}.
- No points for simply listing references in a section.
- To keep this drive focused, no points for adding additional citations to one article, though editors are encouraged to do so whenever possible.
- Primary sources are permitted so long as they are only used to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts. Please see WP:PRIMARY.
- 0.5 points for reviewing submissions of the drive. See more at /Reviews.
- The point is less because reviewing submissions is easier than finding reliable sources. Nevertheless, reviewers have an extremely important job of verifying submissions and require a high level of trust.
- No points for deleting an article via AfD, PROD or blank and redirect.
- Per this discussion, encouraging these actions would cause more heat than light and does not belong to the focus of the drive.
- All citing contributions without
[[WP:FEB24]]in the edit summary will not be counted.- If making multiple edits to an article, include FEB24 in only one edit summary.
- If the editor forgets to put that summary, they may add it retroactively using a dummy edit.
- Problematic behaviors are grounds towards disqualification and blocks. Examples are:
- Spamming articles to AfD/PROD/blank and redirect
- Mass-removal of {{Unreferenced}}
- Adding fake references and content
- Being disruptive by being uncivil, wikilawyering, etc.
Detailed instructions
edit | Remember to tag your edit summary with [[WP:FEB24]], both to advertise the event and tally the points later using Edit Summary Search. |
Find an article in Category:Articles lacking sources (Credits to User:Ajpolino and User:Ipigott).
- Go to the search bar and type
[search term] incategory:"All articles lacking sources". - Go to the search bar and type
articletopic:[topic] incategory:"All articles lacking sources". The list of topics can be found at mw:Help:CirrusSearch/articletopic. - Take a look at § Popular articles
- For WikiProjects, take a look at Bambot's WikiProject Cleanup Listings, click on your project's "by cat", then scroll down to "Cites no sources".
- Use WP:PetScan and find the intersection between "All articles lacking sources" and your category.
Then, find a reliable source. Look for reliable sources, see §§ Some tricks and Determining what sources are usable for tips.
If at least one reliable source is found:
- Cite it inline.
- Add {{reflist}} and ==References== if none are present (see MOS:ORDER).
- Remove {{Unreferenced}} or {{BLP unsourced}} when you are finished adding citations.
- (recommended) Add {{More citations needed}} to large parts of the article or add {{cn}} to short chunks of text.
- Add an edit summary including:
[[WP:FEB24]]
If no reliable source can found with the best of your effort, according to WP:BEFORE, there are a few options:
- PROD the article if it is obvious that the article should be deleted.
- AFD the article if it is not obvious that the article should be deleted.
- Merge discussion and redirect the article if the article has some useful content but it is not notable.
- Make a new thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles if you are unsure.
Progress
edit
Goal: Bring the backlog down to below 100,000. Achieved on February 22! At the end of the drive there were 97,343 articles left, which means that since the start of the drive we have removed unreferenced tags from 14,300 articles.
| Date | Participants | Articles |
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 February 2024 | 241 | 111,643 | — | — |
| 2 February 2024 | 254 | 110,859 |  784
|
784
|
| 3 February 2024 | 261 | 109,820 | 1039
|
1823
|
| 4 February 2024 | 268 | 109,147 | 673
|
2496
|
| 5 February 2024 | 271 | 108,439 | 708
|
3204
|
| 6 February 2024 | 274 | 107,808 | 631
|
3835
|
| 7 February 2024 | 274 | 107,189 | 619
|
4454
|
| 8 February 2024 | 278 | 106,446 | 743
|
5197
|
| 9 February 2024 | 278 | 105,743 | 703
|
5900
|
| 10 February 2024 | 279 | 105,305 | 438
|
6338
|
| 11 February 2024 | 281 | 104,847 | 458
|
6796
|
| 12 February 2024 | 282 | 104,342 | 505
|
7301
|
| 13 February 2024 | 284 | 103,956 | 386
|
7687
|
| 14 February 2024 | 284 | 103,494 | 462
|
8149
|
| 15 February 2024 | 284 | 103,056 | 438
|
8587
|
| 16 February 2024 | 286 | 102,715 | 341
|
8928
|
| 17 February 2024 | 288 | 102,169 | 546
|
9474
|
| 18 February 2024 | 288 | 101,749 | 420
|
9894
|
| 19 February 2024 | 288 | 101,415 | 334
|
10228
|
| 20 February 2024 | 288 | 101,127 | 288
|
10516
|
| 21 February 2024 | 288 | 100,819 | 308
|
10824
|
| 22 February 2024 | 288 | 100,348 | 471
|
11295
|
| 23 February 2024 | 290 | 99,975 | 373
|
11668
|
| 24 February 2024 | 290 | 99,645 | 330
|
11998
|
| 25 February 2024 | 291 | 99,408 | 237
|
12235
|
| 26 February 2024 | 290 | 99,065 | 343
|
12578
|
| 27 February 2024 | 290 | 98,792 | 273
|
12851
|
| 28 February 2024 | 291 | 98,413 | 379
|
13230
|
| 29 February 2024 | 292 | 97,845 | 568
|
13798
|
| 1 March 2024 | 292 | 97,343 | 502
|
14300
|
Milestones
edit- 1,000 articles reached – February 2, 2024.
- 2,000 articles reached – February 3, 2024.
- 3,000 articles reached – February 4, 2024.
- 4,000 articles reached – February 6, 2024.
- 5,000 articles reached – February 7, 2024.
- 6,000 articles reached – February 9, 2024.
- 7,000 articles reached – February 11, 2024.
- 8,000 articles reached – February 13, 2024.
- 9,000 articles reached – February 16, 2024.
- 10,000 articles reached – February 18, 2024.
- 11,000 articles reached – February 21, 2024.
- Goal reached – February 22, 2024.
- 12,000 articles reached – February 24, 2024.
- 13,000 articles reached – February 27, 2024.
- 14,000 articles reached – February 29, 2024.
Oldest backlogs
editCleared backlogs
| ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from April 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
337 / 337 (100%)
|
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from May 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
283 / 283 (100%)
|
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
355 / 355 (100%)
|
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from July 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
241 / 241 (100%)
|
Leaderboard
editLast updated March 08, 12:01 UTC.
Participants
edit
Reviews
editAll participants with experience in citing sources were encouraged to perform reviews. Reviewers were awarded 0.5 points for each review. A tool was available to locate unreviewed submissions and simplify wikitext formatting.
Tips
editDetermining what sources are usable
editEven though we are just citing one source to the article, that source must be chosen carefully. That source needs to:
This is a lot to take in. And worse, sometimes you couldn't find such a source! It can be very hard to determine whether you should go forward to cite the article or ask for its deletion, even for experienced WikiGnomers, and sometimes you have to follow through with your gut feelings.
Generally speaking for English languages sources, citing Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Resources or Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources or peer-reviewed textbooks (for math and science articles) is enough to do satisfy all four of these criteria. However, other books and most reliable non-English sources are not present in these lists. In that case, you need to determine all four of these criteria yourself. It's probably easier to give examples of common not suitable sources:
- Database listings – iMDb, unofficial sport stats and results webpage
- Tabloids – Daily Mail, listicles at Hindustan Times, etc.
- Blogs – Wordpress, Blogger, personal websites
- Wikipedia mirrors, substantially duplicating existing content
- Books not under editorial control, self-published (tip: search on Wikipedia the publisher's name)
Some tricks
editSearching sources
- Use "" (double quotes) to search for the term exactly. This means that "pinnochio" will only show up articles with words matched with "pinnochio", not pinocchio (although some websites will disregard this and show the wrong search term anyway).
- Some articles, especially for more general topics, might have sources available with slightly different wording -- "basketweaving" vs "basket weaving," "basket weaver," etc.
- Search inside millions of old and new books at Google Books and Archive.org - for the archive, go to https://archive.org/search then click the search bar, then click "search text contents" radio button, it will search over 10 million books.
- Access to some paywalled content, including Newspapers.com and ProQuest, is provided to editors via The Wikipedia Library.
- For Google, use - (ie. dash) as a way to remove unwanted entries, like -pinocchio
- See more tips at Wikipedia:Advanced source searching
- You can search for related articles on Wikipedia (as in other pages or other languages) and access some sources there. Do not copy the reference in verbatim. Only after you've checked the source and that the source indeed verify the text, you may cite it in the article.
Reading and parsing sources
- Use machine translation, either at a website or as built in to your web browser, for reading foreign article texts.
- For foreign texts on Google Books where their texts cannot be copied, take a screenshot, go to Google Translate and click on the "Images" button. Upload the image there and Google Translate will translate the passage inside the image itself.
- Use the text searching feature to locate what you are looking for faster, such as Ctrl+F on Windows or ⌘ Cmd+F on macOS.
Processing articles
- Twinkle might be helpful for cleaning up article banners and nominating articles for deletion
- While you're there, you could expand the article or clean up any other problems you see with it.
- If you are familiar with AWB/JWB, you can use it to quickly add a "References" section and {{reflist}} template.
Popular articles
editThe articles below are some of the more popular pages on Wikipedia and thus might be easier to find sources. They are queried from pageviews analysis at Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS). Please remove entries once references have been added. This section should be updated every day.
- List of Chinese martial arts
- List of children's animated television series of the 2000s
- List of children's animated television series of the 2010s
- Body orifice
- List of Beast Wars characters
- Channel 5 (Thailand)
- Assistant commissioner of police
- Amplitude-shift keying
- Barila Sharif
- Area codes in Mexico by code (400-499)
- Central Greece
- Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp
- Capital districts and territories
- Charas (1976 film)
- The Amityville Horror Part II
- Big Brother Mzansi (season 2)
- Children's interest channel
- Anand Bakshi filmography
- 1990 Five Nations Championship squads
- Adjarabet Arena
- Ceremonial dance
- 1990 (TV series)
- Assembly of the African Union
- Bhadrachalam Road railway station
- Blue Hustler
- Area codes in Mexico by code (700-799)
- Blau-Weiß 1890 Berlin
- Bell Educational Trust
- 82nd parallel north
- Boisar railway station
- 70th parallel north
- The Brave Express Might Gaine
- Carriedo station
- The Bill (series 14)
- List of animated television series created for syndication
- List of 64 Zoo Lane episodes
- 66th parallel north
- Borders of Malaysia
- List of pre-modern Arab scientists and scholars
- Analog device
- 1919 German presidential election
Badges
edit-
1 point -
5 points -
10 points -
25 points -
50 points -
100 points -
200 points -
300 points -
500 points -
750 points -
Top 3 of the drive -
Top 2 of the drive -
Top 1 of the drive
